Thesis: Western society’s progressive writers leave their readers with the impression that citizens of the US and allied nations will never be prosecuted for their mega massive crimes against humanity. Legal and moral implications and future ramifications are discussed and contrasted with ongoing litigation and warnings Martin Luther King gave.
For sixty-four of this writer’s eighty-four years on Earth, ‘left’ journalists have been reporting how bad things are, detailing the slaughter of millions of innocent men, women and their children in their very own beloved formerly colonially occupied countries, often exposing inside stories of how US-NATO military invasions, bombings, occupations and CIA operations are planned, sold in media and executed.
Working as an archival research peoples historian for former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, your author has undertaken a search back over the decades of such independent journalism of dissent, of criticism, and opposition to mainstream media promoted public approval and enthusiastic participation in these US-NATO military invasions, bombings, occupations and covert CIA operations, looking for any examples of journalists calling for prosecution under Nuremberg Principles Law, or noting the unlawfulness
of the horrific events being reported, or referring to a need for justice for victims and survivors.
Your author would intensely appreciate readers letting him know of any passage in a published article or writing containing mention of one of the following:
‘prosecutable crimes,’
‘crimes against humanity,’
‘justice’
‘reparations,’ ‘indemnity’ or ‘compensation’
– or even a sentence in which the word ‘crime’ was employed.
Initially, our only purpose was solely to be able to post quotes from commentaries, reports, histories or writings of well read independent journalists, authors and historians on the Ramsey Clark co-founded educational and stimulus website: Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign [http://prosecuteuscrimesagainsthumanitynow.blogspot.com]
which contains pertinent laws and a history of US crimes in nineteen countries. However, when a concerted effort was made to contact as many top journalists and historians as possible, the result was appalling. Half of those written to asking, ‘why not call for prosecution of the many deadly horrors being reported as Realpolitik as unchallengeable as the weather,’ did not reply, though they as colleagues had answered our emails in the past. The answers that did come back were striking,
“No, it would be like whistling in the dark.”
“No I will not call for prosecution in my writing, pointless.”
“Everyone knows where I stand.”
(Many dissimulating.) “I support everything that Ramsey Clark does.”
“Of course we all would like to see prosecution, but the courts are by our corporate rulers, so its impossible.”
If I wrote back too many times insisting, “But doesn’t one usually talk about something one would like
to see happen,” defensive or even angry replies would come back. In one instance, a colleague whose newsletters I never miss reading for their useful information, cussed me out for being obstinate, apparently exasperated by my insistence.
The next fruitless attempt included e-mailings and a few articles that quoted the US law stipulated definition of accessory after and/or before the fact being anyone assisting a felon or felons escape the law. The questions posed were, How could decades of reporting mayhem without mention that laws had been
broken be anything else but helpful to fellow citizens engaged in profitable but deadly military action in innocent countries? Moreover, Why would pointing out such a devastatingly important truth and calling for justice ever be inappropriate? And in the case of millions of innocent people dead, dying or facing death, Is it not inhumane not to call for their killers arrest, indictment and punishment and for indemnity, compensation, and reparations for the millions of victims – even when the killers are the writers’ own fellow citizens? Most importantly, What the hell else would stop the uninterrupted profitable genocide?
By way of contrast, the reader is invited to check out the website of a strong lawsuit against American citizens by an Iraqi mother that is being assisted by former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark at the lawsuits website below:
CLICK HERE to support Support first US-Iraqi lawsuit against Bush Administration about the Iraq War
If Mrs. Sundus Shaker Saleh is doing what is normal when a crime or crimes have been committed, then that would make the behavior of the independent progressive journalists of the West abnormal. Unless of course we hold it is normal for people not to want to see fellow countrymen and countrywomen go to prison.
Then to our amazement, we began
to notice other critical information illogically missing throughout independent ‘left’ progressive journalism.
For first example, all our best minds are aware that the real power and source of this running genocide is a cabal of the wealthy elite running unregulated and widely free Western speculative interest banking led since World War Two from within the Wall Street establishment. Why then does the readership of
anti-imperialist writers rarely hear much about this basic truth, but rather is constantly fed reports that credit bought and beholden US Presidents with power over what Ron Paul has called the illegal and unconstitutional use of America’s Armed Forces and CIA. This deceptive focusing almost entirely on US Presidents, their appointed officials, members of Congress and important judges, all equally owned by financial-centers, simply plays along with what has already long been accomplished by criminal news, information and entertainment conglomerates maintaining cover and needed anonymity for those investing in knowingly criminal use of US Armed Forces and CIA.
Certainly the wisest of our writers and historians know, and have written, recognizing that those powerful investors running a many billion dollar kill and destroy “racket,” like those which were exposed by famous Marine Major General Smedley Butler a century ago,[http://www.rationalrevolution.net/war/major_general_smedley_butler_usm.htm]
would not entrust, or allow, the officials they had put in office to make decisions affecting their now become trillion dollar mega mammoth investments in profitable genocide. Noam Chomsky’s Year 501 – the Conquest Continues, books by economics savvy Ed Herman and Michael Hudson, some fine writing by Finian Cunningham, and hard hitting commentary from Pepe Escobar and Paul Craig Roberts come to mind in this regard. So why should independent reporters and journalists be helping major media in this deception of a presidential power that has never existed. Even the last aristocratic wealthy insider US president of considerable influence, Franklin Roosevelt, confided his own limits of personal power in a now famous note to a close confident, “you and I
know the government has been owned by a financial element in the centers of power since the days of Andrew Jackson.[FDR in a letter to Colonel House, 1932]
Also inexplicably absent from
‘left’ journalism is any suggestion of light at the end of the tunnel. Prevalent are doomsday scenarios. Even as homo sapiens prove a phenomenally deep capacity for intelligence and ingenuity putting a sophisticated camera and research device on a comet racing through outer space five hundred million miles away while mapping the human brain as the genome was mapped earlier, left journalism predicts unavoidable world wars to come shortly and ecological doom on its way without any corrective salvation to be foreseen.
No Justice No Hope Independent Journalism
In dismal addition, no justice no hope alternate media journalism, confronting a world catastrophically aflame in dozens of Third world (read plundered world) nations at a time, exhibits no agenda separate from that of criminal mainstream media, which adheres to a strict focus solely on ‘the news’ topicality of current massive loss of life (that as already said goes unreported as prosecutable crimes). The unopposed Colonial Powers destruction of Libya and assassination of heroic Third world defender Muammar Gadaffi (with a powerful assist from more than a few of the most well left credentialed ‘anti-imperialist sites and organizations) is no longer topical. The truth that the CIA staged civil wars in Afghanistan, Libya and Syria is no longer topical. The massive genocide that began with an obviously illegal invasion of Iraq is no longer topical, just as the Vietnam holocaust has lost topicality, along with the many millions of lives taken in Korea, Guatemala, Congo and on and on – independent media is mostly following the reporting agenda of mainstream (read genocide papering over) media.
It is sadly noticeable that left journalism neither seeks to promote any sliver of solidarity among victim nations of US-NATO-UN military fire-power, nor espouses unity among individuals employed in what many see as the ‘war’* protest industry. (*Actually there have been no wars since WW II, only ‘helpful’ interventions or police actions later dubbed ‘wars’ by media to enable use of such old saw excuses as, ‘Well, war is war,’ and once the use of the word ‘war’ has stuck, accusations of war crimes against the defenders in nations under attack.) It is glaring obvious to US-NATO
victims and survivors that those protesting non-wars to one’s own continuously reelected criminal government are NOT calling for justice for victims and prosecution of fellow Americans.
Finally, not only are names like David Rockefeller, (overseer of genocidal non-wars from Korea onward through his forced appointed confidants Dulles bros, Kissinger and Brzezinski) largely unseen in left anti-imperialist journalism, but likewise are the prominent CIA assets within the anti-imperialist community of writers and organizations extremely seldom identified, nor is the deadly colonial power use of UN armies in Somalia exposed.
On the other hand when, as a G.O.P. presidential candidate, Ron Paul got extraordinary prime time evening news coverage for two weeks as he repeatedly called all the military invasions from Korea onward “illegal, unconstitutional, and terrible loss of life,” ‘left’ alternate media and anti-imperialist ‘peace’ organizations did not pick up the ball and run with it. How many of us noticed, not for the first time, an example of genocide justifying media being more forthcoming in allowing the public to hear
reference to the law than anyone prominent in the progressive anti-‘war’ movement.
Anrunhati Roy describes an even broader ‘left’ complicity in the never ending parade of smaller nations destroyed in her latest book Capitalism: A Ghost Story. Roy explains how funding from the major corporate foundations has been used to steer activists into promoting a plethora of justice-at-home issues thus dividing attention away from America’s genocidal crimes overseas.
Roy denounces civil rights leaders for turning potential revolutionaries into supporter of ‘wars’ that do more than just crush the civil rights of the poor overseas, who are mass murdered for speculative banking capital gains. Roy, “ The civil rights movement in US has become a war supporting movement”
Seems that apart from the writing of a handful of excellent journalist- historians, the audience of American ‘left’ journalism in is reading far less about an ‘awfully mistaken’ US foreign policy of incessant slaughter overseas and much more about protests of injustice at home, and of course nothing of
Martin Luther King’s extremely logical warning that there will be no progress on social justice issues at home while America uses up enormous financial and human resources to kill the poor in other countries. [see Beyond Vietnam – a Time to Break Silence American Rhetoric: Martin Luther King, Jr: A Time to Break Silence (Declaration Against the Vietnam War)]
Though most of the well read independent historian-writers endorsed the Howard Zinn-Ramsey Clark initiated King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign [http://kingcondemneduswars.blogspot.com/] years ago, none have responded to its coordinator’s plea to propagate the fact that Martin Luther King held all Americans, including himself, responsible for what he described as atrocity wars on three continents to maintain unjust predatory investments that produce the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments which Americans
refuse to give up. [ibid] To the contrary, in independent alternate media the finger of blame points away from the American people and at the government that King dismissed as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, as he spoke directly to the people of America he held responsible. This is the same self-deceptive playing-the-innocent game protestors play and go home feeling separate from the killing done, ongoing and being planned in their name.
From conversations on the subject with his Korean and Vietnamese family members, friends, colleagues, and students, your author has gathered that citizens of nations that have survived invasions and bombings by Americans tend to be embarrassed for Americans who think they were ‘on their side’ because
they protested or wrote articles against what their own repeatedly reelected government had their neighbors, friends, sometimes even family members doing to them overseas. Survivors of profitable US genocide might not hold any Americans responsible for what Americans did to them (unlike Martin Luther King, who did), but neither do they see Americans, who pointed a finger away from themselves and at the government they continued to obey, innocent of what was done in victimized nations. Now, if survivors knew of any Americans who during their civil disobedience were calling for justice for them and prosecution of those that invaded bombed them, these Americans might will have gotten a nod of approval in human camaraderie.
Has anyone noticed any intention within ‘left’ journalism to stop the freaking geeks on Wall Street from investing in death and destruction. A hundred years from now, will not historians find that the most informed and educated among the citizens of the first world were the most responsible that the genocide for hegemony and profit when on and on without any attempt to stop it?
Otherwise, which stratum of American and European society would future historians credit that the genocidal neocolonialism continued uninterrupted for so long? Future historians might ask themselves:
– could the already unscrupulously wealthy have stopped themselves from investing in what was bringing the greatest capital accumulation and ever greater opportunities for further profits?
could enough high public officials, who long before had sold their souls in order to climb and prosper, have had sufficient change of heart to have brought them to throw a monkey wrench into the genocide for profit machine?
– could enough of the clergy have been moved to come to Jesus, to have given up their privileges, and preached the truth?
could enough of the well paid media celebrities and other media personnel begin to have felt shame and been willing to refuse to continue to justifying the carnage?
– could some high ranking general following Marine Major General Smedley Butler’s example, but earlier than he did, have blown away everyone’s cover with help of someone in media or clergy?
– could enough of the kids pulling the triggers and pushing the buttons have stopped believing what they were told at home, in school, on TV and refused to ‘serve’ further?
could the ordinary Americans, who formed Occupy Wall Street demanding a better cut, have come to realize that a better cut would only come when the phenomenally expensive overseas massacres ceased and refused further cooperation?
– or should the well educated opponents of the genocide, the nominally independent writers of alternate media, have stopped their pretense of calling for reform the unreformable in time to have anticipated the call for prosecution that eventually did come from the entire formerly plundered Third World that had united once the US and Europe had lost their economic hegemony and could no longer threaten sanctions to block lawsuits in the court system of a UN that was no longer white colonial power controlled?
Readers are invited to imagine a future when American ‘foreign policy’ will be looked back upon as Ramsey Clark did when he condemned it as “the greatest crime since WW II,” a future world wherein investment in crimes against humanity will have long become unprofitable for the seemingly never ending ocean of bankrupting and broadly punishing lawsuits for compensation for the many many millions of wrongful deaths, tens of millions of injuries, reparations for the almost infinite amounts of destruction of property, and indemnity for the gargantuan theft of natural resources those crimes generated – mass murderous crimes against humanity never having had any statute of limitations.
Any exceptions to the generalities discussed in this article, and we are sure there must be many, though with only this single archival research peoples history searching, no luck has been had in finding them. As already said, help would be appreciated and quotes found entered on the Prosecute US Crimes
Against Humanity Now Campaign website.
Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents in 67 countries; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India, Sweden and the US; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural
pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents, Kerala, India; Minority Perspective, UK; Einartysken, Sweden: Saker Vineyard, Germany; Dissident Voice; Ta Kung Pao; Uruknet; Voice of Detroit; Mathaba; Ethiopian Review; Palestine Chronicle; India Times; MalaysiaSun; China Daily; South China Morning Post; Come Home America; CubaNews; TurkishNews; HistoryNews Network; Vermont Citizen News have published his articles; 300 of which are available at: click http://www.opednews.com/author/author1723.html
; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989. Is coordinator of the Howard Zinn co-founded King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign:
(King Condemned US Wars) http://kingcondemneduswars.blogspot.com/ and website historian of the Ramsey Clark co-founded Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign http://prosecuteuscrimesagainsthumanitynow.blogspot.com/ featuring a country by country history of US crimes and laws pertaining.
